How to play toon (and how to remember a color you have seen a thousand times)
toon is a free cartoon color guessing game you play in the browser. Each round shows a familiar cartoon character or brand logo with one region painted the wrong color, and you paint it back from memory.
There is nothing to memorise on screen. The memory is yours: you have seen these characters and logos a thousand times, and toon asks how well you actually remember them.
No download, no account, no app. It runs on a phone and keeps working with the network switched off.
How a round works
- Look. The artwork appears with one region in a color that is clearly wrong, like a hedgehog in lime green. The wrong region is outlined so you know which part to fix.
- Fix. Three strips sit beside it: hue, saturation and brightness. They start on the wrong color. Drag them and the region repaints as you go.
- Submit. When it looks right, submit. The round result shows your color next to the real one and the points it earned.
A run is five rounds, and no character or logo appears twice in one run.
The three strips
- Hue is the color itself, running from red through yellow, green, blue and purple back to red. Get this wrong and nothing else saves the round.
- Saturation is how vivid the color is, from full strength at the top to grey at the bottom.
- Brightness is how light it is, from full at the top to black at the bottom.
The saturation and brightness strips redraw as you move the others, so each one always shows the colors it can actually reach.
Scoring
Each round is worth 0 to 10 points, so a run scores up to 50. toon does not compare the numbers on the strips. It converts both colors to how the eye sees them and measures the gap, so a small slip in a pale color costs less than the same slip in a vivid one. Being out on hue costs the most, and getting the hue close earns back part of a miss on the other two strips.
Hints
You get two hints a run on easy and hard, at most one per round. A hint dims each strip except a window covering 16 percent of it, and the right value sits somewhere inside that window. Hints do not lower your score, so spend them on the rounds you are least sure of.
Easy, hard and brutal
| easy | hard | brutal | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Regions | the big colors | adds small details | same as hard |
| Hints | 2 a run | 2 a run | none |
| Timer | none | none | 3.5 s per round |
On brutal the timer starts once the strips are ready, and when it runs out the color you are on is submitted for you.
The daily set
The daily set is five rounds, picked from the UTC date and the difficulty, so every player gets the same characters and logos that day and scores are comparable.
Tips for remembering a color
Set the hue first, then brightness, then saturation. Think of where you have seen the character most, a cereal box or a game cover, and picture that. Brand colors are rarely muddy: if a logo looks grey, push saturation up. Cartoon skin tones are lighter and warmer than you think.
Frequently asked
How do you play toon? Each round shows a cartoon character or logo with one region in the wrong color. Drag the hue, saturation and brightness strips until it matches the color you remember, then submit.
How is a round scored? From 0 to 10, by how close your color is to the real one as the eye sees it. Five rounds make a maximum of 50.
Do I need to know color codes? No. You never type a code. The strips show the colors as you drag.
How do hints work? Two a run on easy and hard, one per round at most. A hint shows a window covering 16 percent of each strip, with the right value inside it. Hints do not cost points.
What is different on brutal? The hard set of regions, no hints, and a 3.5 second timer that submits whatever color you are on when it runs out.
Is the daily set the same for everyone? Yes. It comes from the UTC date and the difficulty, so every player gets the same five rounds that day.
Where toon sits
toon is the color memory game of the portfolio. For a color game played against a target on screen, try tint; for a visual memory test, try recall.